Example Company
Software engineer
- Location
- San Francisco
- Type
- Full time
- Compensation
- $150k-$200k
- Posted
- 2 days ago
Join a team building useful software. Work closely with engineering and design to turn new ideas into products.
Loading job details
Principal Scientist [Machine Learning Engineer] - Ads Platform
- Location
- Remote
- Type
- Full time
- Posted
- 3MO AGO
About the role
What we’re building and why we’re building it.
Fetch helps people live rewarded every day, with a vision to become the rewards destination for everyone. We turn everyday activities into meaningful rewards, whether it’s grocery shopping, grabbing a quick meal, or playing a favorite mobile game. To date, we’ve awarded more than $1 billion in Fetch Points to our users.
Each day, more than 13 million receipts are submitted on Fetch, providing visibility into over $212 billion in gross merchandise value. This creates the largest retail-agnostic, SKU-level view of household spending, powering Fetch as an outcomes-based advertising platform that helps brands acquire and retain lifelong consumers.
The Fetch app is available on the App Store and Google Play, with more than 6 million five-star reviews from a highly engaged and loyal user base.
It’s not just our users who believe in Fetch: with investments from Softbank, ICONIQ, DST, Greycroft, and partnerships ranging from challenger brands to Fortune 500 companies, Fetch is reshaping how brands and consumers connect in the marketplace. When you work at Fetch, you play a vital role in a platform that drives brand loyalty and creates lifelong consumers with the power of Fetch points. User and partner success are at the heart of everything we do, and we extend that same commitment to our employees.
At Fetch, we value curiosity, adaptability, and the confidence to explore new tools, especially AI, to drive smarter, faster work. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be ready to learn quickly and think critically. We welcome learners who move fast, challenge the status quo, and shape what’s next, with us. Ranked as one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes for two years in a row, Fetch fosters a people-first culture rooted in trust, accountability, and innovation. We encourage our employees to challenge ideas, think bigger, and always bring the fun to Fetch.
About the Role:Fetch is building an AI-powered, objective-based ad buying platform that helps advertisers turn business goals into measurable outcomes. We’re looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to architect and build the intelligence behind that platform—from translating advertiser objectives into optimization strategies to making real-time decisions about ad delivery, bidding, and budget allocation.
You will help create a buying experience where advertisers define what they want to achieve, and our systems determine how to achieve it. Your work will connect prediction, optimization, experimentation, and measurement in a continuous learning loop that improves advertiser performance while delivering relevant experiences for Fetch users.We’re looking for someone with hands-on experience building automated advertising products such as Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max, or comparable objective-based buying platforms. You understand how these systems work beneath the advertiser interface and have built the models, decision systems, or infrastructure that power their performance.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role with influence across Product, Data Science, Platform, and Engineering. You’ll set architectural direction, write production code, and lead zero-to-one development of systems central to Fetch’s advertising business.
Role Responsibilities
Build Objective-Based Ad Buying: Architect systems that translate advertiser goals—such as incremental sales, customer acquisition, or return on ad spend—into optimization objectives, delivery strategies, and measurable outcomes.
Develop Automated Optimization Systems: Design and implement the prediction and decision systems powering bidding, budget allocation, pacing, audience selection, and ad ranking. Build feedback loops that continuously adapt delivery based on observed performance.
Connect Measurement to Optimization: Partner with Data Science and Product to incorporate conversion signals, attribution, incrementality, and experimentation into optimization systems. Address challenges such as delayed outcomes, sparse signals, and uncertainty in performance measurement.
Architect for Real-Time Scale: Build the data pipelines, feature infrastructure, model serving, and low-latency decision systems required to support advertising at consumer scale. Balance model quality, reliability, latency, and infrastructure cost.
Advance Learning and Experimentation: Develop systems for rapid experimentation, model iteration, and performance evaluation. Apply approaches such as online learning, exploration and exploitation, and constrained optimization where they improve advertiser outcomes.
Lead Through Product and Technical Partnership: Work with Product to define platform capabilities, performance goals, and advertiser controls. Translate complex optimization tradeoffs into clear product decisions and scalable technical designs.
Own Zero-to-One Execution: Take ambiguous problems from initial design through production launch and ongoing improvement. Stay close to implementation, diagnose performance issues across the stack, and establish reusable architectural patterns.
Mentor and Multiply Engineering Impact: Coach senior engineers and technical leads, raise standards for system design and execution, and build shared expertise in advertising ML and optimization.
Accelerate Engineering with AI: Use AI-assisted development, prototyping, and analysis to shorten iteration cycles and improve engineering productivity.
Minimum Requirements
Preferred Requirements
Compensation: At Fetch, we offer competitive compensation packages including base, equity, and benefits to the exceptional folks we hire. Discover our benefits and how our employees live rewarded at https://fetch.com/careers.
At Fetch, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure through:
Fetch is an equal opportunity employer that embraces diversity, inclusion, and respect for all individuals. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Our commitment to inclusivity ensures that everyone is treated with dignity and has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent, skills, and potential.
Fetch also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities or those with sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. If you need assistance with the application process or require an accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@fetch.com.
Fetch helps people live rewarded every day, with a vision to become the rewards destination for everyone. We turn everyday activities into meaningful rewards, whether it’s grocery shopping, grabbing a quick meal, or playing a favorite mobile game. To date, we’ve awarded more than $1 billion in Fetch Points to our users.
Each day, more than 13 million receipts are submitted on Fetch, providing visibility into over $212 billion in gross merchandise value. This creates the largest retail-agnostic, SKU-level view of household spending, powering Fetch as an outcomes-based advertising platform that helps brands acquire and retain lifelong consumers.
The Fetch app is available on the App Store and Google Play, with more than 6 million five-star reviews from a highly engaged and loyal user base.
It’s not just our users who believe in Fetch: with investments from Softbank, ICONIQ, DST, Greycroft, and partnerships ranging from challenger brands to Fortune 500 companies, Fetch is reshaping how brands and consumers connect in the marketplace. When you work at Fetch, you play a vital role in a platform that drives brand loyalty and creates lifelong consumers with the power of Fetch points. User and partner success are at the heart of everything we do, and we extend that same commitment to our employees.
At Fetch, we value curiosity, adaptability, and the confidence to explore new tools, especially AI, to drive smarter, faster work. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be ready to learn quickly and think critically. We welcome learners who move fast, challenge the status quo, and shape what’s next, with us. Ranked as one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes for two years in a row, Fetch fosters a people-first culture rooted in trust, accountability, and innovation. We encourage our employees to challenge ideas, think bigger, and always bring the fun to Fetch.
About the Role:Fetch is building an AI-powered, objective-based ad buying platform that helps advertisers turn business goals into measurable outcomes. We’re looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to architect and build the intelligence behind that platform—from translating advertiser objectives into optimization strategies to making real-time decisions about ad delivery, bidding, and budget allocation.
You will help create a buying experience where advertisers define what they want to achieve, and our systems determine how to achieve it. Your work will connect prediction, optimization, experimentation, and measurement in a continuous learning loop that improves advertiser performance while delivering relevant experiences for Fetch users.We’re looking for someone with hands-on experience building automated advertising products such as Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max, or comparable objective-based buying platforms. You understand how these systems work beneath the advertiser interface and have built the models, decision systems, or infrastructure that power their performance.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role with influence across Product, Data Science, Platform, and Engineering. You’ll set architectural direction, write production code, and lead zero-to-one development of systems central to Fetch’s advertising business.
Role Responsibilities
Build Objective-Based Ad Buying: Architect systems that translate advertiser goals—such as incremental sales, customer acquisition, or return on ad spend—into optimization objectives, delivery strategies, and measurable outcomes.
Develop Automated Optimization Systems: Design and implement the prediction and decision systems powering bidding, budget allocation, pacing, audience selection, and ad ranking. Build feedback loops that continuously adapt delivery based on observed performance.
Connect Measurement to Optimization: Partner with Data Science and Product to incorporate conversion signals, attribution, incrementality, and experimentation into optimization systems. Address challenges such as delayed outcomes, sparse signals, and uncertainty in performance measurement.
Architect for Real-Time Scale: Build the data pipelines, feature infrastructure, model serving, and low-latency decision systems required to support advertising at consumer scale. Balance model quality, reliability, latency, and infrastructure cost.
Advance Learning and Experimentation: Develop systems for rapid experimentation, model iteration, and performance evaluation. Apply approaches such as online learning, exploration and exploitation, and constrained optimization where they improve advertiser outcomes.
Lead Through Product and Technical Partnership: Work with Product to define platform capabilities, performance goals, and advertiser controls. Translate complex optimization tradeoffs into clear product decisions and scalable technical designs.
Own Zero-to-One Execution: Take ambiguous problems from initial design through production launch and ongoing improvement. Stay close to implementation, diagnose performance issues across the stack, and establish reusable architectural patterns.
Mentor and Multiply Engineering Impact: Coach senior engineers and technical leads, raise standards for system design and execution, and build shared expertise in advertising ML and optimization.
Accelerate Engineering with AI: Use AI-assisted development, prototyping, and analysis to shorten iteration cycles and improve engineering productivity.
Minimum Requirements
- Hands-on experience building and shipping automated, objective-based advertising products such as Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max, or comparable platforms. Experience should include developing underlying ML, optimization, or delivery systems.
- Proven experience building production systems in one or more core advertising domains: bidding, budget allocation, pacing, conversion prediction, ad ranking, audience optimization, or campaign optimization.
- Strong understanding of how advertiser objectives, optimization signals, delivery constraints, and measurement interact to drive campaign performance.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, ML infrastructure, large-scale data pipelines, and production model serving.
- A track record of delivering measurable improvements in advertiser outcomes through ML and optimization.
- Strong software engineering and system design skills, with experience setting architectural direction while remaining hands-on in implementation.
- Experience leading zero-to-one initiatives and aligning Product, Data Science, and Engineering around complex technical decisions.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and elevating technical quality across teams.
- Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments, prioritize effectively, and carry initiatives through launch and iteration.
Preferred Requirements
- Direct engineering experience on Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max, or a similarly automated ad buying product.
- Experience optimizing toward purchase outcomes, customer acquisition, return on ad spend, or incremental business results.
- Expertise in constrained optimization, auction systems, contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or other methods used in automated ad delivery.
- Experience with attribution, incrementality testing, causal inference, and conversion modeling.
- Experience addressing delayed conversions, sparse feedback, cold starts, and exploration in advertising systems.
- Experience building streaming features, online learning systems, and real-time feedback loops.
- Familiarity with retail media, commerce advertising, or optimization using transaction and purchase signals.
Compensation: At Fetch, we offer competitive compensation packages including base, equity, and benefits to the exceptional folks we hire. Discover our benefits and how our employees live rewarded at https://fetch.com/careers.
At Fetch, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure through:
- Equity: We offer full-time employees equity in Fetch, so that everyone can benefit from Fetch’s growth.
- 401(k): Fetch will match your contributions dollar for dollar, up to 4% of your eligible pay.
- Benefits for humans and pets: We offer comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans for everyone, including your pets.
- Continuing Education: Fetch provides ten thousand per year in education reimbursement.
- Employee Resource Groups: Take part in employee-led groups that are centered around fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace through events, dialogue, and advocacy. The ERGs participate in our Inclusion Council with members of executive leadership.
- Paid Time Off: On top of our flexible PTO, Fetch observes 9 paid holidays, as well as our year-end week-long break. (Holidays will vary for Canada-based roles)
- Robust Leave Policies: 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all employees, plus 6 additional weeks of paid childbirth recovery leave for birthing parents, and a flexible return-to-work schedule.
- Calvin Care Cash: Employees who are welcoming new family members will also receive a one-time $2,000 incentive to assist employees with covering the cost of childcare, clothing, diapers, and much more!
- Flexible Work Environment: Collaborate with your team in one of our stunning offices, or you can work fully remotely from anywhere in the US for US-based roles. We’ll ensure you are equally equipped with the hardware and software you need to get your job done in the comfort of your home. (applicable for most roles)
Fetch is an equal opportunity employer that embraces diversity, inclusion, and respect for all individuals. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Our commitment to inclusivity ensures that everyone is treated with dignity and has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent, skills, and potential.
Fetch also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities or those with sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. If you need assistance with the application process or require an accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@fetch.com.
Similar roles
Staff/Sr. Staff/Principal AI research scientistWRITER · San Francisco · New York
Principal Scientist, Immunogenicity and Ligand Binding AssaysModerna
Member of Technical Staff (Staff Researcher) — Machine Learning SystemsAMD · Singapore- Lead Data Scientist - FreewheelCompa · New York · Chicago · Sunnyvale
Sr. Analyst, Global Client PaymentsAvalara · Pune · Remote
Senior Scientist, Discovery ScienceApriori Bio · Cambridge